This is the final installment of a series on Best Hiring Practices. The series is not intended to be all-inclusive, but rather an examination of the most impactful things you can do to improve your hiring process. In the previous postings, we’ve talked about the need to hire well . . . and the high
Best Hiring Practices 101c
In our last posting on “Best Hiring Practices,” we talked about the need to write a comprehensive job description detailing not only the skills an applicant must have, but also the behaviors. Now the next step is to prepare written interview questions. Why written? For that answer, and for a lot more on preparing for
Best Hiring Practices 101b
This is the first installment of a series on “best hiring practices,” and as such, it probably makes sense to start at the beginning. The real beginning is making the decision that you need to hire someone, but for this purpose, we’ll assume you’ve already done that and that you now need to take the
Best Hiring Practices 101a
Although unemployment is still high and small business owners are reluctant to undo some of the painful staffing cuts they’ve had to make, some owners are creeping back into the job market to fill some needed vacancies. So it seems an appropriate time to talk about a hiring “process.” While there’s no hiring process that
“Have your children go work for someone else before they work for you.”
Some small business owners dream of creating a “family business,” that is having one or more other family members actively engaged in running the business. It’s a romantic notion and very compelling to some . . . Mom keeps the books, Sis and Little Johnny do a variety of chores around the place, and Dad
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” “What gets measured, gets done.” Those are two complimentary management axioms, and they both happen to be true. Take the first, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” It’s pretty hard to argue with that. For instance, how could we manage our receivables without a measurement of some
“Give up trying to grow the bottom line. Grow your people and your people will grow the bottom line.”
I was in a conversation recently with a guy who works for a technology company, and during the course of the conversation, the subject of “training” came up. He said that his company has a training budget for their technicians, but not for their managers. He said he knows this because he wanted to attend
Now, Discover Your Strengths
In his excellent book, “Now Discover Your Strengths,” author Marcus Buckingham and co-author Donald Clifton discuss the work they did for The Gallup Organization to find out what makes successful people successful. What do those successful people have in common that makes them high achievers? So they sifted through over two million interviews that Gallup
“Communication is to leadership as the swing is to golf; everyone can do it, but few do it well.”
Consistently, “being in the know” ranks near the top of employee satisfaction surveys. People want to know what’s going on around here. They want to know what their part is. They want to know how events, both good and bad, are impacting the company. And why shouldn’t they? After all, it’s their company and their
“There is no point in doing well that which you should not be doing at all.”
It’s not unusual. We just continue to do certain things in the business because we always have done them. Or we continue to do them because it would be a pain in the neck to train someone else to do them. Either way, we end up doing things that are not the highest and best
